It will be interesting to see whether CA's Ingres r3 is successful as an open source project. When SAP decided to release SAP DB under an open source license, there was a bit of press fanfare and a collective yawn from the open source community despite the arguably superior features of SAP DB at the time it was released. MySQL and PostgreSQL already dominate the open source "market," and it will be tough for Ingres r3 to attract developers. Ingres will need to offer a significant advantages in performance and features to attract a large audience.

CA is also ponying up $1 million for a contest to create open source migration tools to r3 from other databases. The folks at CA are savvy enough to know that just putting the software out under an open source license is not necessarily enough to attract new users most organizations will want a smooth path from their current relational database to any new solution.

With any luck, the tools created for the contest will also be usable (perhaps with some modification) to migrate to other open source databases. While Ingres r3 is certainly a welcome addition to the open source universe, the migration tools are in greater demand.